We have some great projects coming down the pipeline, but we want to get them out sooner rather than later. That is why we are looking for developers who would like to work with Sugar Developers on bringing these projects out. Here are a couple of the projects we are currently working on.

Subpanels 2.0:

We are turning our Subpanels into Dashlets and would love for you to help out. The idea behind this project is to give users the same flexibility that they get on the home page. A couple of big benefits will be that users can set filters on the subpanels. For example you can say “I only want to see cases that are not closed in this dashlet” . Another big benefit is the amount of flexibility that developers gain. We already have prototypes of a Google Maps dashlet that will map out addresses as a subpanel and RSS News Feeds that search for an account name. It is also all AJAX based so you’ll notices faster load times. This project is heavy on the PHP and JAVASCRIPT side.

AJAX UI:

Along the same lines of performance, we also have a project to revamp the UI with an enhanced AJAX UI. The idea is to reduce the time between clicks and seeing the results. This is going to be accomplished by starting out with a simplistic method of initially just loading what has changed between page loads. From there the project will branch out to the point that the HTML is generated client side and only data is being transfered back and forth.This project is heavy on the JAVASCRIPT side and light on the PHP side. It will utilize the REST API available in Sugar 5.5.

Theme Builder:

Themes allow you to work in an environment where you truly feel at home, but it’s always been a lot of work to get that “Just Right” feeling. With Sugar 5.5. themes get a major over haul. Now we want to harvest that over haul and make it a cinch to build the theme of your dreams.This project is heavy on the Java Script side.

Language Manager:

Think wiki-style collaboration on language packs. If you find something wrong with the German language pack fix it and everyone will have your fix right away. It will also allow for creating regional dialect based language packs. This project is heavy on the PHP side.

If you would be interested in working on any of these projects just go to new.sugarforge.org and register. Not all the projects are up yet though. Also if you don’t want to develop, but want to check out any of the functionality feel free to and remember to give us feedback.

Digg recently dug into why users are using IE6. Their results are quite interesting.

Of course, this only represents users thar are going to digg with IE6, but their results do tell us “IT departments prevent users from using a modern browser.”  Why are IT departments doing this?  Laziness?

Consider this:

IE6 just had two new vulnerabilities confirmed by MS in the last six weeks… even after 8 years of development.

YouTube announced it is dropping IE6 support … will the market dictate the end of life for IE6?

Sugar is NOT going to drop IE6 support in 5.5, but we’re going to introduce an IE6 only theme.  So grab your chaise lounge, sit back, and tell us how you feel.

If you have already noticed Colline Lee’s post about writing cloud connectors we have posted an updated version of the developer guide for the 5.2 release.

There is a lot of activity around here as SugarCon is just over a week away.  On Februrary 2-4 customers, partners, and community members will gather in San Francisco to soak up a lot of great content we have put together around all things Sugar.

A big piece of SugarCon will be sessions by members of the Sugar Engineering team who will be covering a range of topics around the up and coming Sugar 5.5 release as well as what we are planning for Sugar 6 later at the end of the year.

In preperation for SugarCon we have launched some new forums around Sugar 5.5 so that we have a place to post content early and solicit feeback and questions from the community members.

With the 5.5 release we are finishing up a few platform updates that begun with the release of Sugar 5 and the new MVC framework.  Items such as updating the web services and theme frameworks, adding REST support, as well as a new addition to Studio to edit wireless layouts.

If you are heading to SugarCon we look forward to seeing you there.  For the rest of you, head on over to the forums for 5.5.  We will be adding content during the event all the way up to the release.

Ready to sharpen your coding skills?

Foothill College in Silicon Valley, CA, is the site of this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp, a free weekend event by and for developers that features 115 sessions spread across two days. To date, 886 people have registered for this event, which takes place on November 8th and 9th, 2008.

A quick glance at the list of sessions shows a lot of interesting topics, from architecture to Open Source to security. Many speakers come from marquee software companies in the valley, so the content promises to be insightful and valuable. More than just a set of lectures, the Code Camp organizers aim to provide dialogue and discussion amongst developers. They have published a manifesto, which reads:

The Code Camp Manifesto consists of six points: (1) by and for the developer community; (2) always free; (3) community developed material; (4) no fluff – only code; (5) community ownership; and (6) never occur during working hours.

Speaker registrations are closed for this year, but you can still register for the event as an attendee. Just fill out this short form and you’re in!

Keeping up-to-date and connected at the event will be easy as well. They’ve set up a companion Wiki for posting session content, a Twitter feed for broadcasting short updates to attendees before and during the event, an RSS feed for news, and a LinkedIn group so people can keep track of new-found friends after it’s all over.

This “Code Camp” idea isn’t confined to the Bay Area. A quick web search turned up camps in Southern California, Raleigh, North Carolina, Boise, Idaho, and many, many more.

If there’s not a Code Camp in your area, consider organizing a Code Camp of your own! Start small…get a couple of local companies to sponsor some food and prizes, and ask around at local user groups to find developers who are willing to share some aspect of their skill set with others. It’s a classic “win-win” for all: developers get to network with their peers and pick up a new skill or two, sponsors get the attention of lots of potential employees and are seen in the community as “good guys”, and the local college gets additional traffic to the campus, exposing others who may not know of its bounty of classes and resources.

I spoke with someone at Foothill College (the site of Code Camp) and he said they willingly donated the rooms and labs so that the developer community would be aware of their small, slightly out of the way college and would hopefully think about taking courses there once they knew about this gem. As a part-time instructor at Foothill, I heartily applaud this effort and hope to see more returning students on campus, especially if they sign up for my class!

While most of the Sugar app has worked fine in the Safari web browser for a while now, the patch A release of Sugar 5.1 adds official support for Safari to SugarCRM.  Check out the newly updated supported platform matrix and the details on the 5.1.0a patch in the release announcement.

Following quickly on the heels of the Sugar Developer Guide, you will now find the Sugar entity relationship diagrams available online.  The Sugar Community Edition ER diagram is available here and the diagrams for Professional and Enterprise editions are availble along with the software here.

The Sugar Developer Guide is now available to view online or download.

The Sugar Developer Guide provides information for developers who want to extend and customize SugarCRM functionality using the customization tools and API’s provided in the Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional Edition and Sugar Enterprise Edition. From adding custom fields to building new modules, from extending existing UI controllers to integrating data via Web Services, the Sugar Developer Guide details how the Sugar code works and and how to work with it.

The Developer Guide is found along with the other Sugar documentation.

We are pleased to bring you this useful tool and we look forward to expanding on it with your feedback. You will note that you can add comments to the HTML version of the document. We encourage you to contribute to the accuracy and thoroughness of this new guide.

–The Sugar Team

The first release of Sugar Data Center Edition is nearing completion in the next couple of weeks.  As the engineering team is going through the final rounds of testing I thought I would shed some light on what we are trying to accomplish with this new product line.

SugarCRM as a company is now over four years old.  We have been running our Sugar On-Demand business since the beginning and have learned a lot along the way as our customer base and hosting environment has grown.  We began by creating some automation in our environment for deploying Sugar On-Demand instances, then adding some reporting and admin automation for our sales and support teams.  After our IT team built a UI on top of their work, we decided that it was time to productize our internal efforts and release it as Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE).

There are two audiences in the Sugar community that we are targeting with this new product line.  The first one is our Sugar partners who are reselling and hosting Sugar products in their own data centers around the world.  The second audience is our larger multi-national enterprise customers who are rolling out larger company-wide Sugar deployments across several distinct divisions and geographical locations.

DCE is built on top of the same Sugar Platform that our Community, Professional and Enterprise editions run on.  The product serves as an administration console for managing many Sugar instances in a hosting environment.  The levels of automation that we are initially targeting are:

• deployments
• upgrades
• support user management
• licensing
• monitoring/data collection

To further extend the automation aspects that DCE provide, we have also extended our Web Services API for some DCE-specific function calls.  This is primarily targeted to our partner base who would like to have their already existing systems such as their own corporate Web sites and billing systems perform automated calls without having to log into the system manually to perform certain actions.., a couple use cases could include:

• A prospect signing up on a partner’s corporate site could fire off an automated call to DCE which will provision and license the evaluation copy and then notify the prospect when it is live and ready to be used.., typically within a couple minutes
• A customer who is updating their details via an existing billing system can then have the billing system call out to the DCE instance and update the customer information in there to keep updated licensing/billing information

There are a hefty amount of features we are digging through and organizing for some future releases targeted for later this year and early next.  If you have some ideas for some DCE functionality that would help you in your Sugar hosting needs, drop them in the comments.

The intrepid BitRock team has outdone themselves again and released SugarCRM on their Bitnami Stack.  The Bitnami Stack installers allow you to install Apache and various different run-time languages (PHP, Ruby, etc) along with various databases (MySQL, PostGres, etc).  Then you can plug in different applications like SugarCRM or Drupal on top of those stacks.

The BitNami-packaged SugarCRM stack is available as both a complete, self-contained Stack, and as a BitNami Modules. BitNami Modules enable users to run several applications on top of one AMPStack (Apache/MySQL/PHP) that runs on Windows, Linus or Mac. Here’s an article on how the Modules system works.  It’s very quick and easy to download and install the BitNami SugarCRM package on your local machine.

What I found even cooler was that you can sign up on RightScale for 10 free hours of time on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform and deploy your Bitnami for SugarCRM stack there.  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to actually get the SugarCRM application to correctly deploy on my RightScale test account yet, but I’m sure I’ll get it figured out here shortly.

Very cool all around!

Strict mode is a mode where at least one of STRICT_TRANS_TABLES or STRICT_ALL_TABLES is enabled.

Enabling strict mode can increase data integrity. How? In a nutshell, when strict mode validates inputed and reports errors for invalid data and does not allow the invalid data to be written to the database.

Examples of invalid data that can be handled by strict mode:

1) If you try to insert a 50-character value into 40-character field, in non-strict mode the excess characters will be truncated and the insert will succeed. With strict mode, MySQL returns an error and the insert fails.

2) The date field in mysql is internally stored as a string, which means that invalid dates can be inserted in non-strict mode, and you will see errors only when you try to render the data. With strict mode, again, MySQL returns an error and the insert fails.

The above are examples for just two data types. There are may be several other conditions associated with each data type.

For more detailed and technical information about enabling strict mode in MySQL, read the page on SQL Modes in the MySQL website.